Speakers

Joanna co-authored/co-edited Laws, Language and Life: Howard Pattee’s classic papers on the physics of symbols with contemporary commentary with Pattee, which is one of the main book-length entry points into his work. She also continued developing Patteean themes herself, especially complementarity and replicable constraints in language and cognition.

In How Molecules Became Signs, Deacon says the segregation of dynamical and structural constraints was described by Howard Pattee; in other origin-of-life contributions, Deacon and co-authors explicitly discuss Pattee’s notion of the epistemic cut and the distinction between physico-chemical dynamics and semiotic controls.

Gazzaniga explicitly uses Pattee’s ideas in his consciousness work. In some of his essays, Gazzaniga directly refers to what Howard Pattee calls the “epistemic cut” and says Pattee has been working on the problem for fifty years and “has a handle on it.” A scholarly review of The Consciousness Instinct goes further and says the book’s account of layered organization and complementarity draws “directly and heavily” on Pattee.

Bedian was Pattee's student during his stay in Buffalo, working togethet with Silvano Colombano on achieving closure of self-description and self-reproduction in the genetic code. Bedian describes Pattee as a stimulating mentor whose position at the interface of physics, conceptual problems, and biological complexity attracted him. Bedian’s relation to Pattee is therefore especially tied to origin-of-life and genetic-code questions, which are central to Pattee’s physics-of-symbols program.

Joslyn is a prominent figure in the circle of researchers who have formalized Pattee’s qualitative ideas. Along with collaborators like Luis Rocha, Joslyn has translated Pattee’s concepts into the language of systems science and computational modeling. Joslyn has worked extensively to create formal, mathematical definitions for  Pattee's semantic closure, moving it from a theoretical biological principle to a functional model for artificial life and complex systems.

As his mentor in Stanford University, Pattee influenced Eric Horvitz’s early thinking on the intersection of biology, physics, and information theory. Horvitz has often cited Pattee's work on "semantic closure," the idea that for a system to be "alive" or truly intelligent, it must be able to describe itself and act on those descriptions, as a foundational influence on his own research in artificial intelligence.

Peter Wills has extensively built upon Pattee’s principle of semantic closure, which argues that for a system to be alive, it must possess a symbolic description (like DNA) that it can physically implement through its own mechanisms. Wills' work is often seen as a physical grounding of Pattee's more philosophical concepts of the "epistemic cut," the necessary separation between physical laws and biological information.